Quasar Whispers in a Blizzard
The news came to my door yesterday
of a birth in the neighbourhood
of a quasar––the first they said
that any of us had seen.
The message was sent out quickly.
But for all its lightening speed
it still took a couple of hundred millenia,
which is longer even than the post
on a bad day, so I am lucky
I was here at all to get the news.
The achingly beautiful complex ball
floating gently in it's blue and white
crystal shawl, hurtles along
in the cold, in the intense darkness.
It is crowded, but it is alone.
The darkly mechanical complex shell
floats above the ball,
a single speck of life suspended
against the infinity of blue and white.
It is crowded, but it is alone.
The hugely complex engineered system
wrapped in it's metal skin
speaking with a thunderous roar
against which my mind whispers
only to me in the way
voices in a blizzard are lost
to all but the speaker.
I am crowded, and I am alone.
I'm staring out on white cotton balls
soft hills and valleys running
across around each other, down
and down and down to
the flat plain of the endless
white void which disappears into
the blue eternity of sky
out beyond the touch
of my hand, my feet, my sight
reaching to the end of my mind
to the end of my time
to the very edge of my life.
The Rockies float by my window
a motion picture with no plot, no end,
a recurring loop that varies
with each pass different
yet intensely the same.
Into the east they rise
to a towering crescendo
ending as suddenly, as finally, as life itself.
I'm staring in on a hundred odd busi-people
each lost in the void of their own energy,
their own thoughts, voice, work
waves of their sounds reach my ears
rhythmically meaningless to me
waves of sight reach my eyes
erratically scratch at my brain
they are beyond the touch of my words,
my thoughts, my feelings, my soul,
though I reach to the end of my mind
to the end of my time
to the very edge of my life.
Inside we are caught together, cast apart,
each insulated by our self importance,
each isolated from our common life
we are as adrift on our way as
the craft in which we trust, as
the earth on which we expect again to walk.
Suspended life forms with
nothing out there, nothing at all.
No one to catch me if I should fall.